Cloud warehouse vendor Snowflake valued at $12.4bn after funding blizzard

Marian McHugh
@MarianMcHughCRN
10 February 2020

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Cloud-based data warehouse vendor Snowflake has seen its valuation triple to $12.4bn after raising a cool $479m in its latest funding round.

The flurry of investment was led by Salesforces' corporate venture arm and Dragoneer Investment Group and brings Snowflake's total money raised to $1.4bn.

Founded in 2012, Snowflake has quickly emerged as one of the fastest-growing tech companies, raising $713m in separate Series E and F funding rounds in 2018, which led to the vendor's, at the time, record market valuation of $3.9bn.

Former ServiceNow CEO Frank Slootman took the reins last year, taking over from former Microsoft exec Bob Muglia who had headed the company since 2014.

Slootman told San Francisco Business Times that the company doesn't need the new money raised, but that it was a way to attract Salesforce as part of a "strategic alliance".

"We were not in need of capital at all," he told the publication.

"This is not a traditional fundraise. It is part of a strategic alliance with Salesforce that we initiated. We wanted to advance our content strategy. We need core data assets, or content, put onto the Snowflake platform and that is why we are doing this."

He added that this partnership will allow both companies to work closer together, as he wants customers who already use Salesforce on the Snowflake platform to share data more easily than they can now.

Late last year Slootman announced his plans to bring Snowflake public in 2020 and told the San Francisco Business Times that the latest funding will not affect the IPO timeline, though external factors such as the US presidential election this year could impact when the vendor goes public.

"The funding has zero effect on our IPO timeline. They are completely separate considerations," he stated.

"I have previously said I felt the earliest we could go out with an IPO would be this summer. It doesn't mean we will do it then, but that would be the earliest I feel we could do it.

"We are preparing the company to go out and will when we are ready. We have no pressure with investors. We have the luxury of time to pick the right timeframe."